


Én Is Szeretlek

by Lily (alyelle)



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:54:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22239796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alyelle/pseuds/Lily
Summary: In which Dom takes a flight to Budapest, a flight back to New York, and finally gets a good night's sleep. Post-series, spoilers through 4x13.
Relationships: Darlene Alderson/Dominique DiPierro
Comments: 16
Kudos: 64





	Én Is Szeretlek

**Author's Note:**

> They're not mine and I'm making no money off this; I just really love their stupid faces. Equal parts my love song to Budapest, which I literally just left, and my love song to these two idiots. One shot, but I promise nothing about not setting follow ups into the same universe (read: I'm already writing the spin-off series).
> 
> [Also archived on [Dreamwidth](https://stowaway.dreamwidth.org/43204.html)]

“Are you missing something?”

Dom looks into the politely blank expression above her and wants to scream. _Yes. Yes, I am, and she’s a pain in the ass but I – she’s supposed to be here, and she isn’t, and I have got to get off this plane_.

“Um - no, I’m good.”

And she sits back in her seat, anything but good, too tired to stop her mind racing through the fifteen different places Darlene might be right now, too tired to stop her right hand straying to rest in the one place she should be.

Her eyes prickle. She closes them tightly, dragging in a deep breath. There’s a slow throbbing in her side around her stitches - which she probably _has_ gone and torn with that stupid fucking run through the airport - and there’s a frantic hitching making its way up through her chest, into her throat, but she will _not_ cry in front of all these people, on this goddamn flight into who knows what. So she exhales, ignoring the shakiness, and forces another cool breath into her lungs. 

She keeps her eyes closed as the plane begins to taxi, speeding ever faster down the runway. As it lurches up into the air, she feels her stomach tighten and grits her teeth in response. She won’t cry and she won’t throw up, not today. She will sit on this airplane for the next eleven and a half hours, and the second she sets foot in Budapest, she’ll buy the first ticket she can get on the first damn flight home.

Dom breathes in and out, slowly and deliberately, counting each rise and fall of her chest as the plane loops its slow circles of ascent. Somewhere around 79 she loses track, so she starts again, but the thrum of the engines distracts her and before she hits 25 she’s had to begin a third time. By the time the plane has levelled out to cruising altitude, she is lost to the gentle lull of machine sounds and the rhythm of her lungs, inflating, deflating, inflating again.

She recognises that she’s dreaming in a way that she doesn’t normally; the lights and the music are too vivid, too perfectly set. The liminal drone of airport conversations fills the air but all she can hear is Darlene’s voice in her ears, begging her to get on this flight, to reach out and take her hand and _stay_. The seconds hang in front of her instead of passing, caught between one boarding call and the next. If she holds her head just so, she can zoom focus on every blink of Darlene’s eyes, every frown that creases her forehead, every tiny worry that her teeth make at her bottom lip as she offers excuses and ultimatums. 

Dom listens, her chest aching and her eyes blurring, as Darlene lays blame on her; on herself; on the noisy, dirty city around them. _But you said you would. I’m no good on my own._ And she tries to reform the words she’s already said, to shape them into something she really means, something that matters, but they come out just as wrong this time too.

“Send me a postcard, okay?”

_Tell me you need me, not just someone. Tell me you want me there._

Darlene’s fingers curl into her sides as she moves to hug her. Her body, so little under that fluffy coat she wears, shakes from head to toe as she starts to cry into Dom’s shoulder and Dom squeezes her tighter, wishing for nothing more than the ability to protect her, to take away whatever she’s suffered so that she can just _breathe_ again. Just for a moment; just long enough to realise that the answers she’s looking for aren’t on the other side of the world. She draws a shuddering breath, blinking away her own tears, fumbling for the scrap of paper in her pocket. She winces as time telescopes and the words fail to arrange themselves yet again.

“When you’re ready to grow up.” 

_I’m sorry. This is all I have to give you._

There is no mistaking the hurt in Darlene’s face as she takes the little white strip, her fingertips brushing Dom’s own.

“Don’t take too long through,” she adds, her insides positively _screaming_ at her to stop; to go; to wrap her arms around this girl who is willing to walk away from the only family she has and into an unknown future with her. “They need you.” 

_I need you. I need you._ It pounds through her head like a heartbeat. _Please, Darlene, just tell me, just ask, just ask just -_

“They can’t handle me.”

And as she walks away, Dom feels herself dissolve while time rewinds, clearing the stage, setting the lights just so one more time. In the background, there is a hum of conversation, of electricity.

“I’m talking about giving yourself a break,” Darlene says, her eyes huge and unblinking, “about finally letting go.” Dom bites on the inside of her lip, but it doesn’t stop the ache rising up inside her, choking off her air as she does exactly the opposite and wraps her arms around Darlene, holding onto her for all that she’s worth.

She almost thinks she hears Darlene whisper _please_ as she buries her head and sobs against her.

Tears slip down her own cheeks too, splashing over the back of Darlene’s coat, onto the floor at their feet. Darlene shivers against her, tangling her fingers into the ends of Dom’s hair, and Dom forces her body to utter stillness, holding her breath, holding Darlene, suddenly sure that if she can just keep her in the circle of her arms until that plane leaves, everything will be okay. 

Seconds and minutes clatter noisily around her. Without meaning to, Dom lifts her head and draws back to say goodbye, because she has already done this, decided for them, and time waits for no one. There is moisture streaking Darlene’s cheeks and a slow, relentless drip falling down over her, over them, pooling at their ankles. 

Dom looks up to the ceiling. As if it was waiting for her, water cascades down, working its way into her nose and ears, stinging her eyes. When she reaches for Darlene, her hands grasp at empty air.

_You can’t handle me._

_I can_ , she screams into the torrent, _I can, Darlene, please_, but the water just fills her lungs and the last thing she sees before she dissolves into blackness is the spool of time rewinding itself once more.

“You hold on to a lot, and you hold on fucking tight.” Darlene’s accusation pulses unspoken between them: _so why aren’t you holding onto me?_

Dom reaches out to her but she dances back, one step followed by another, her black boots thudding against the puddles still covering the floor. The airport jolts, shakes, finally rights itself, but Darlene keeps walking steadily backwards, her eyes fixed on Dom’s as the lights go dark around them. This time when they come back up, Dom finds herself on a chair in the departures lounge, a rope looped tightly around her middle and her hands pinned behind her back.

“There is _nothing_ for you to do here.” Darlene walks circles around her, just out of arms’ reach. Her eyes are cold. Her eyeliner is smudged worse than it normally is.

 _Don’t make it about what’s here, Darlene. Make it about what’s there._

More words that won’t behave the way she needs them to, more silence to fill. Dom tries to force a phrase, a platitude, anything that will crack through that broken, betrayed stare, but language has never come when she called. 

“Jesus, Dom, no wonder you can’t sleep.” 

Darlene shoulders her backpack and walks through the boarding gate, leaving her with only the clamour of should-have’s and could-have’s writing themselves out in her head.

“Where’s your brother?” 

She’s back at the bar. The lights are bright and vivid once more. The water is gone. Her hands are unbound.

Darlene’s eyes flick to the right as she answers, a too-obvious lie about Elliot running late. Dom’s stomach clenches. Darlene must know that she sees through this story, and she can’t do this, not again, can’t walk off into a new life on nothing but the say-so of others and the hope that she’s chosen right this time.

She’d almost given her a reason, just once, before Dom shut her down – and yeah, maybe that was while life was doing its best to remind them both that things actually _can_ always get worse. Maybe it was nothing more than Darlene’s guilt, or a terrible attempt at comfort. But they were words given freely: without spite, without malice, with nothing but resignation and regret. They’ve echoed in Dom’s head for days now. 

If she never knows anything else for sure, she has to know that. 

She swallows, steeling herself as Darlene begins to walk towards their flight, and plays the only hand left to her. 

“I can’t do this.” 

Darlene spins on her heel. Dom forces herself to hold her stare, trying to ignore the horrible thud of her heart in her ears.

_Change my mind. Come on, Darlene, for the love of god, change my mind. Tell me I actually mean something to you, that this isn’t just-_

Darlene looks at her for a long, hard moment, but she doesn’t argue. She simply turns again and walks down a corridor lined with windows. The airport falls silent and still as she moves. The long rows of lights start to go out one by one. By the time Dom can move her feet, she’s little more than a blur in the distance. 

_No_ , her mind shouts at her feet, _no, this isn’t- you’re-_. She’s running before she realises, through the long, snake-line tunnel with its endless glass viewing panes, barely keeping up with the lights that are blinking out above her – but she is gaining on Darlene, so she keeps moving, past the banks of airplanes outside the windows, ignoring the piercing pain in her side and the way her breath is starting to come in short, shallow gasps.

Darlene turns a corner. When Dom rounds it three seconds later, she stops dead. She’s standing in a field of dappled light and rain-brushed grass. Her lungs are screaming blue murder. The air sticks in her throat. She lifts a hand to brush her hair back, and finds it covered in blood. 

Darlene waits in front of her, eyeing her cautiously, shock and sorrow written in equal parts across her face. 

She means to ask what’s wrong, or how she got here, but the words rewrite themselves once again and in a broken sob, Dom hears herself say, “You’ve taken everything from me.”

“Don’t overthink this,” Darlene replies, her voice filled with hurt and self-recrimination as she reaches up, twines her fingers into Dom’s hair, and pulls her into a kiss. 

The field melts into a dark counter; the sun splits into softly glowing balls of light. The bar is empty. Her glass is empty. Darlene’s eyes are empty.

“I have no friends. I have no social contact. I have no life because of you.”

Blood stains Darlene’s collar and the buttons of her jacket. There is a tiny smudge of it against her hairline. Time is rushing by in eddies and swirls, and Dom keeps failing to pluck the words she needs from its stream. 

_I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Darlene_. “If you’re open to changing your mind, I’d like to show you something. Come with me.”

And this time Darlene follows her, three perfect paces behind. Dom leads her back down the corridor, past the rows of airplanes, through the twisting halls of the FBI offices, into a restaurant where a table waits at the centre, settings laid and candles lit. 

For the second time Dom balks, her mind reeling away from the scene in front of her. She turns to explain, to apologise, but there is only air behind her. Only space and blackness. 

“Dom.”

Darlene is sitting at the table, her hair falling in messy waves over her shoulders. Her eyes are shadowed and smoky. Tiny flecks of ash drop from the cigarette she holds. On the plate in front of her is a red velvet box.

“Darlene?”

“Dom,” she calls again. “That’s us. Let’s go.”

“Go – where? Darlene? Go _where_?”

Darlene doesn’t answer, doesn’t look at her, doesn’t move a muscle. The cigarette tip glows and from somewhere high above Dom’s head, a drip of water falls. She tries to walk over to her but it’s like pushing through molasses; her feet stick to the floor and another drop of water falls on her. Slowly, gritting her teeth, Dom forces one foot closer to that dim lighting, that box like blood. One, then another. Drip. Drip.

 _You weren’t here_ , she wants to scream. _This wasn’t you_.

Darlene looks up as if she can hear the thoughts in her head and smiles. 

“Hello, Dominique,” she says in a voice that isn’t hers, and _ripples_ into another woman – older and colder, but still smoke-eyed, still messy-haired. 

For a moment, she can only marvel at the detail of this face, so perfectly rendered from memory when she hasn’t kept so much as a photograph, when she’s spent so long thinking of her as _they_ that it’s a shock to remember it was _she_.

“Sit,” she continues in the elegant, effortless tone that had captivated and controlled Dom and half a hundred other students. 

Dom stares at the table, at the knives and forks arranged just so, at the box centred perfectly on the bone-white china, at the tasteful shadows thrown by the candles. The water drips slowly, inexorably, onto her hands, her head, the restaurant floor. A faint scraping sound comes from somewhere beside her, and for the first time she notices the other tables: all filled with couples, and all of them watching her.

She has never seen anything so terrifying.

She stays where she is, brushing at the little droplets that continue to fall, that cling to her forehead. If she walks to that chair, it will always be this: curated friends, fashion, dinner parties. It will always be _her_ , showing her off to the right people, the right connections. Her token girl from Teaneck, refined, redefined, until she’s suitable. Until she’s perfect.

“No.” 

As her voice breaks the silence, water thunders over her. Cold ribbons of it run down her neck, like fingers at her throat.

“Dominique.”

“ _No_.” The deluge beats down relentlessly, blinding and choking her.

She clicks her tongue. “She can’t look after you like I can.”

“Maybe I’ll look after her,” Dom says, or tries to say, coughing into the flood. Water pounds against her head and her shoulders, the force of it crushing each breath she attempts to take. “Maybe we’ll look after each other,” she whispers into the current, as the last of the air leaks from her lungs.

There is silence and darkness.

Dom opens her eyes to her lungs filling with oxygen, a deep, soul-drenching breath that feels as though its her first in years. The plane is rolling lightly to a stop. The people around her are already trying to stand. She rubs her eyes, dry and gritty with sleep. She blinks into the pale blue light that fills the cabin.

It occurs to her that she should feel - something. Unsettled. Overwrought. Something violent or wretched. But aside from a dull ache between her shoulder blades and a crick in her neck, the only feeling that suffuses her body is one of deep, coveted rest.

She wanders through the massive halls of the airport in a daze, letting the sounds and sights of other travellers wash over her. The immigration desks are all but empty this early, the baggage carousels more or less deserted. Her eyes stray to the signs hanging from the ceiling, proud bearers of symbols that tell her how she can get to the city and where the toilets are. For a brief moment she contemplates the metro, but as she’s about to step in the direction the arrow points, exhaustion washes through her.

The woman at the information desk speaks better English than she does. Within minutes she has helped book her a room – in a safe area, she assures Dom, who just nods with glassy eyes and wonders what this pleasant, reassuring creature would say if she knew even half of what she’s lived the past few months – a return flight in three days time, and a taxi. She guides her out front towards the young driver with a map of the city and a wish for a pleasant stay.

Dom sits in the back of the taxi, watching the buildings of Budapest’s outer districts roll by. The driver points things out every so often in a cheerful, lilting accent. When he lifts her bag out and sets it on the curb beside her, she reaches for her phone on instinct; her fingers fall still halfway through unlocking it when she realises that she’ll have no cell service here.

“Fuck,” she whispers under her breath, and the driver smiles.

“It’s okay. The e-coin. We have it here, too. You’re American, yes?”

“No. I mean, yes. Yes, I’m American. It’s just - this won’t work here.” She waves the phone at him. “No network. It’s okay, I have cash somewhere.” 

She digs into her handbag, suddenly grateful that Darlene insisted on her taking a fistful of the currency she’d exchanged when they first arrived at the airport. Her stomach twists at the memory of her smile, the way she’d laughed as she pushed the crinkly old notes into her hands. Clutching her wallet like a lifeline, she pulls out one of the biggest bills she has and gives it to the driver, waving away his protest that it’s too much. 

“No, please,” she says, pressing it into his hand. “Please take it. It’s not really mine anyway, it’s my friend’s and she... she’d want you to have it. For looking after me.”

He grins back widely, squeezing her hand in farewell. “You say to her that she is very welcome.” 

“I will,” Dom says softly to the empty street as the taxi pulls away. “I will.”

Checking in is a matter of moments: she picks up her bag, trots up the short flight of stairs to the hotel entrance, and gives her name to a middle-aged woman with gentle eyes. A key card and a quickly-scribbled wifi code later, she is bundled into an elevator and finds herself stepping out on the top floor of a squat but stately building. The interior has been renovated – recently, she thinks, or at least more recently than her apartment back home. 

There’s no coffee machine but there is an electric kettle sitting on the sideboard, and the obligatory tiny packets of instant coffee beside it. She fills it and flips it on, then sinks down on the edge of the bed, letting her body flop back so she can stare at the ceiling.

“What am I doing here, Darlene?” she whispers.

Her stomach somersaults again as she says Darlene’s name, her brain flying immediately back to all the places she might have gone, all the possibles and impossibles that might have befallen her between the bar and the boarding gate. Propping herself up on one elbow, Dom grabs for her phone, thumbing it unlocked and entering the password for the wifi network as quickly as she can. If Darlene’s alive, if she’s safe, she must have tried to call by now. Or text. Something.

She stares at her phone as it connects to the network, as the notifications start flashing across her screen. Email. Email. Message from her brother. Message from her mother. Email. Five/Nine alert. Email.

Nothing.

She keeps watching until the screen dims and finally times out. With shaking hands, Dom swipes it unlocked again and taps into Signal, to the single message thread she keeps in there. Her name on the screen, her clipped little way of talking in text, are oddly calming. 

The ghost of a smile crosses Dom’s lips. She can still hear the incredulity in Darlene’s voice, back when she’d first made her download the app and demanded to know how she could possibly work in cybercrime if she didn’t even use expiring messages. She can still feel the frantic race her pulse had run when ignoring her hadn’t worked, when she’d given in and mumbled about contingency and paper trails while she faced the other way and tried to pretend her cheeks weren’t turning a slow and steady pink. Darlene had made a show of rolling her eyes but her messages had stopped their vanishing act almost immediately. 

Dom lets her eyes linger on her username for a second longer, wondering again exactly what her fascination with Lolita is; contrary to Leon’s opinion, she _does_ read and can spot a reference that obvious a mile off. Then she takes a deep breath and lets her fingers flick over the keyboard.

_Are you okay?_

Her phone immediately buzzes an alert. 

_Error: Contact is not a Signal user._

“Shit,” she whispers, the memory creeping in. Darlene, bloodied and defiant. _My phone’s not gonna do you any good, I just wiped it._

She casts her mind back to that map that covered her office walls, its lines like accusations spilling left and right around the ruthless eyes of the Alderson siblings, but she knows already that there’s no alternative. She never had Darlene’s email address. She’s surprised she ever got her number. Flopping back down on the bed, Dom lets out a long sigh in the ceiling’s direction. She can’t call. She can’t message; she can’t email. She can’t really do anything until Darlene contacts her – or until she gets back to New York and uses every resource left to her to hunt her down.

She stares unblinking at the blank cream surface above her, at the little ridges of the cornices. Her eyes feel gritty and her head is starting to ache a bit. Images float in and out of her head in ones and twos: water, rope, a bar stool. Darlene’s face. _Her_ face.

Dom frowns as she summons up the face of the person she’s spent every waking moment of the last five years trying to forget. It doesn’t sting like it used to. A restless sort of irritation crawls under her skin, but that urge to run and run, to put as many thousands of miles between them as she possibly can, that’s... gone. Has been gone for a while now, she realises with a start.

Pushing herself up into a sitting position, she looks around the hotel room. She’s not going to spend the next 48 hours sitting here waiting for Darlene to text, and she’s sure as fuck not going to spend it sitting here thinking about her ex. She digs into her bag, pulls out the map the information clerk gave her, and spreads it on the bed, peering down at the little crosses and stars scribbled on it. Her hotel is only a short walk from the Danube, which seems as good a place as any to start to fill in the next two days. She quickly downloads an offline map in place of the paper one, tugs her hair back into a messy ponytail, grabs her handbag and heads downstairs.

It’s barely five minutes to the river the poets and musicians have glorified. She cuts through a park, crosses a road and is suddenly at its banks, alone amongst pockets of sightseers. She walks along the promenade, hands stuffed into the pockets of her coat, and studies the water. It’s not blue at all. It’s a mossy grey-green, cool and glassy. It’s the colour of Darlene’s eyes.

“Jesus, Dom, ” she mutters to herself, huffing a wry laugh, “you’re– ” 

Before she can finish the sentence, her eyes catch on a gingerbread confection of a building to her right and she stops dead, mouth half-open in amazement, at the feet of the Hungarian parliament building. 

It’s incredible. It’s like nothing she’s ever seen in her life, like every fairytale palace in every story she ever read as a kid. Its domes and turrets reach up into the fluffy winter clouds, burnt orange where they’re not covered in frost. There are more windows and arches and decorative carvings than she can count. She crosses back over the road, barely able to tear her eyes from it, and all but runs up the nearest set of stairs. At the top there’s a plaza, icy and empty, and she walks its perimeter, staring all the while at the architectural marvel towering over her. 

Without thinking, she tugs her phone from her pocket and photographs the building. A stray fleck of ice or snow falls onto her screen, and as she brushes it away, she realises this is the first photo she’s taken in years that isn’t a crime scene. Probably the first tourist photo she’s taken in her life. 

Another speck of snow falls, catching her hand this time. Dom looks up to the sky, heavy and grey above her, and laughs.

She stands there until her toes start to freeze inside her boots, watching the little white flecks drift this way and that on the breeze. When she finally walks back down the stairs, she does so slowly, her eyes flicking from the parliament to the river and the spires on its opposite bank. There’s a bridge to her right and another to her left, with a small crowd gathered halfway between it and her. On instinct, she walks towards them. Her eyes stray to the people who pass her, assessing and cataloguing, but no one looks back at her. With her phone out, she’s just another visitor, anonymous and uninteresting. 

After so many months of being the zoo exhibit, watched and prodded and poked at all hours of the day and night, it’s no longer distressing to feel unnoticed. It’s refreshing; a blast of cold winter wind for her soul.

The crowd by the edge of the bridge are standing amidst tiny bronze sculptures of shoes, with flowers strewn amongst them. It’s a poignant sight, moving in a way Dom can’t explain. She peers down at her map. _Cipők a Duna-parton_ , it reads, and when she taps on it, “Shoes on the Danube Bank”. A memorial. Its blurb is short and heartbreaking.

She lets her eyes drift over the line of shoes once more, wondering what Darlene would think of it; wondering if there will ever be a world free of dictatorial madmen and capitalist overlords. As she makes her way to the bridge, scenes from _Careful Massacre_ run through her mind, overlaid with the memory of all those smiles in the park as the people around her checked their e-coin wallets. The greatest redistribution of wealth in history.

For the first time, she does feel a tiny flicker of pride that she contributed to it.

It’s too cold to keep her phone out, so she lets her feet lead her, map be damned. It’s not as if she can get lost anyway, not with that parliamentary masterpiece standing so recognisably in the distance. Crossing to the other side of the Danube, she wanders back towards it, watching the shifts and sparkles of the winter light reflecting off the water. This side of the city is dominated by a massive hill, and all the spires she could see from the opposite bank are now invisible, hundreds of feet above her head. She scans the huge rise to her left, and is just about to head towards the bridge in the far distance, to make a square and cross back over, when she spots another glimmering white fancy high in the air.

Even from here, she can tell it’s beautiful. 

Dom looks around at the near-empty street and shrugs to herself. It’s not like she’s got any other plans to keep.

The walk through the winding streets takes longer than she’d thought, and about halfway up the rise an icy wind starts to blow against her. Tugging her coat tight, she huffs clouds of breath into it, smiling as the little dragon puffs form and immediately disappear. It’s like being a kid again, when every winter was the coldest winter ever, and her mother would shout at her to stop messing about and come inside before she caught her death.

Eventually she makes it to the top, to what looks for all the world like a medieval town. Cobbled streets lead every which way amongst sandstone homes and storefronts whose façades bear the same ornate decorations as the parliament. A church looms at the end of the street she’s on, its roof glittering with tiles of chocolate, ochre, and turquoise. Dom makes a slow lap down and around it, pulling her phone again to capture some of the spirals and spires, the pointed archways and the big rose window at the front. She’s not a fan of churches but this one is graceful. Serene. 

She turns another corner and is once again met with a view straight from a fairy story. The building she’d seen below sits perched on the edge of the hill, its peaks and swirls like buttercream frosting. A central staircase sweeps upwards in both directions to little round towers, dotted with viewing holes and capped with pointed roofs. Victorian-style lampposts are dotted at intervals, already glowing softly in the dim afternoon light. Dom knows nothing about architecture but she suddenly wants to learn, if only so she can explain tightness that grows in her chest as she stares at these towers, the wonder and astonishment and _smallness_ that courses through her.

There’s hardly anyone up here so she takes her time climbing the stairs, walking the passageways that line the edge of the cliff. The river snakes below like a thick satin ribbon. The parliament is tiny from this distance, postage-stamp perfection against a dark grey sky. Dom snaps photo after photo, of the city viewed through the window arches, of the brickwork and the crenellations, of the carved reliefs that decorate the walls. Not one of them will capture its beauty, but she wants to try anyway, so she can remember it properly when those feelings of having accomplished nothing come back to plague her at four am. To show it to her mother, who’s never left New Jersey. To show it to Darlene, who she can’t even pretend to be mad at, not now; who she wishes more than anything was here to see this beauty, this permanence, to feel overshadowed and awed with her.

It’s growing dark by the time Dom finally starts making her way back downhill. She checks her clock – 3:35pm – and realises that not only has she been out for hours, she’s _starving_. 

She returns along the bridge she first came over and crosses to the other side of the road, farthest from the river, scanning the buildings for a cafe or supermarket as she walks. It’s not long before she finds one, tucked between a laundry and a souvenir store; there’s a cosy teapot decal on its door and a mound of sweet-looking pastries in the front window. Ducking inside, she smiles at the girl behind the counter and has approximately three seconds’ bliss before panic sets in.

“Hello,” the girl says, returning her smile. “You can sit anywhere.” She speaks with that same gentle lilt the taxi driver had, and Dom breathes a sigh of relief as she slips into the nearest free table.

 _Learn another language_ , her brain adds to the list of new year’s resolutions it’s already making.

The girl brings over a glass of water and sets it down on the table. “Would you like coffee?” she asks, and Dom nods.

“Yes. Um – black? No sugar. And the cakes in the window, one of those please?”

“The kürtőskalács?”

“Sure, yeah. Thank you.”

The coffee, when it comes, is stronger than at home; rich and thick, with just the right amount of bitterness to offset the warm, sugar-crusted dough of the cake. She finishes it in mere bites, and when the girl passes by her table again, she asks for another. It’s just as soft and sugary, and just as delicious. 

She takes the back streets and laneways on the walk back to the hotel, wandering between rows of tall buildings, letting the grandeur and ruin sink in. The lady from this morning has been replaced at the front desk by an elderly gentleman who nods his head to her with a smile. Dom smiles back, raising her hand in a little wave as she heads to the elevator. She flips on the kettle when she gets to her room and sinks onto her bed, acutely aware of every muscle and tendon in her legs, every aching bone in her feet. She only means to close her eyes for a moment but by the time the kettle has finished boiling, she’s deep in sleep.

This time she doesn’t dream at all.

Twenty-seven hours after she first sets foot in Hungary, she wakes to pale light streaming through the open curtains and her phone vibrating against the counter. Amongst the half-dozen alerts are two more messages from her mother and a notification from Signal that traps her heart in her throat. She taps it open. 

There’s a new number underneath Darlene’s username and an extra sentence at the bottom of their thread.

> _Not to completely flip out or anything, but where the FUCK are you?_

Dom looks at the timestamp, then her clock. Two minutes ago. Her fingers skitter over the keyboard as she types a single word: _Budapest._

Three dots appear underneath it almost immediately, then disappear just as quickly. A second later they start again, blinking one after the other for a solid minute until they stop entirely. Dom stares at her screen, waiting for the ellipsis to return. 

It doesn’t. The display times out. And then, the buzz like an electric shock, three white words plaster themselves across the screen. 

_Signal call: D0loresH4ze._

All it takes is one touch, the gentle press of a fingertip against that little red circle, and Darlene’s beautiful, infuriating face fills her screen.

Her hair is a mess; not its usual, carefully-constructed mess that tells the world she doesn’t give a fuck, but an actual mess, like it’s been in and out of ponytails, tugged on and worried at. There are black circles under her eyes that go beyond makeup smudges and a telltale red swelling along her eyelids. She stares at Dom, her eyes wide and exhausted, and Dom stares back, unable to speak or think or do anything beyond trying to remember how to breathe.

The silence ticks on and on, into forever, until Darlene finally says in a shaky voice, “You came back for me.”

“Yeah,” Dom whispers. “What happened?”

A strangled sound, half-misery, half-hysteria, escapes Darlene’s mouth for the barest of seconds, until she claps her hand over it and stifles the noise. Dom watches her shoulders rise and drop through two, three, four breaths. Finally, she lets her hand fall away and says tiredly, “I went back for you.”

And now it is Dom’s turn to choke back laughter-filled tears, moisture gathering in her eyes as she tries – and fails – not to grin from ear to ear. Darlene watches her for a moment, teeth worrying at her bottom lip, and then starts crying for real, her body shaking, tears spilling messily down her cheeks. Without thinking, Dom touches the tip of her index finger to the girl on her screen.

“Don’t cry. Please, Darlene. I can’t – I can’t watch you cry. Not from all the way over here.”

Darlene rubs the back of one hand across her cheeks, presses her knuckles into her eyes. “Guess you better get back here then,” she says through a sniffle, but she manages a hint of a smile and Dom’s insides practically melt. 

_I guess I better_. “What’s happening over there anyway?” she asks, fighting the urge to reach out to the screen again, to stroke her fingers over the tears still staining her face.

“Oh, you know.” Darlene takes a deep breath. “The usual. City’s in chaos. Zhang’s dead. Elliot blew up a power plant and is in the hospital. Also he’s not really Elliot, but that’s a whole other story.”

“He - _what_?”

“Come home, Dom.” She wipes the last of her tears from under her eyes with a thumb, and takes another shuddering breath. “Please. I – I miss you.”

Dom feels the heat rise in her face. “It’s only been a day,” she mutters.

“A fucking long day.” Darlene chews at her bottom lip again, just for a second, her eyes downcast. If she didn’t know her better, Dom would swear there’s a blush creeping across her cheeks too. “Come home to me.” 

_I am. I am. Say it._

“I – I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“When?”

“Eleven...” she fumbles for the map with the scribbled details at the top, “no, twelve-thirty.”

“Okay.” Darlene frowns slightly, turning quickly to the side, then clears her throat. “I, um. I’ve gotta go. Sorry.” She sniffs again, exhaling in a rush. “I’ll see you soon, okay?”

“Okay.” 

Before Dom can say anything more the screen goes blank again, leaving her phone lying heavy and silent in her hand. She lets it drop onto the bed, running a hand through her hair as she replays the end of that conversation. _I miss you. Come home to me._

“I miss you too,” she whispers to the empty room. For a moment she sits unmoving in the stillness, wishing she’d said those words out loud; wishing that just once she could say the thing she feels instead of the thing she thinks is right. Then she pushes up off the bed.

She will, she decides, as she heads towards the shower. When she gets home. She’ll tell Darlene... everything. The whole sordid story: the half-truths, the omissions, the endless lessons in caution and correctness. The cowardly choice of not choosing, and how she’s done nothing since but run herself headlong into her work to keep from drifting away. Why she never sleeps. 

As the hot water streams over her, Dom thinks back to the night she visited Angela, to that horrible dream; the only dream she’s ever had since she left law school, save for the other night. She still remembers what she said: _it was when I stopped fighting it, when I finally let go and stopped struggling so much – that’s when I survived._

“Surrendered,” she murmurs into the spray, voicing that ugly, bitter word for the first time. All she had really done was surrender. A current had washed over her, controlled by a beautiful woman with a chameleon face, and she had given herself up to it, let it carry her along into a new reality, into emptiness. 

Five years. It’s somehow been five years. She’s sick of emptiness.

When she’s done, she shuts off the water and stares up at the droplets that cling to the silver shower head. They fall slowly, one by one, to land on her skin. She brushes them gently away, wraps herself in a towel, and starts to dress for the life where she no longer dreams of drowning.

Later, after she’s eaten, she returns to the lady at the hotel desk, who happily marks down a handful more stars and crosses on her crinkled city map. Dom thanks her in Hungarian, one of the six words she now knows after a fifteen minute beginner’s lesson; she clasps Dom’s hands between her own, repeating _szívesen, szívesen_ with twinkling eyes. 

Dom pauses, swallows hard, and asks her one more question. The woman grins broadly, scribbles a series of letters in one corner of the map. Then, with one hand on her elbow, she guides Dom towards the door, pushes her gently out into the street and tells her to have a good time.

The first of the hieroglyphs etched onto her map is down to the left and around the corner, so she starts there and spends the next several hours happily wandering from point to point, filling her eyes with arches and spires; with sprawling mansions and crumbling ruins; with the graceful winter skeletons of the trees that stand guard in the corners of each park and square. She eats bean soup perched at the bar in the window of a tiny cafe, listening to her second Hungarian lesson as she inhales its rich, smoky scent. She walks by the opera house and on a whim, joins the tour that is about to start. Its rooms drip with gold and red velvet; its walls and ceilings are rich with paintings.

By the time she makes it back to her hotel room she’s exhausted once again, and bypasses dinner in favour of sleep – a fact that she doesn’t regret until four am the next morning when she’s sitting in the departures lounge with a black hole growing in her stomach and the only thing open is a Burger King. 

Without the luxury of passing out, her flight back to New York is infinitely longer, and she finds herself fidgeting in her seat like a child, as if that will somehow make the minutes move faster. She almost wishes she hadn’t left Irving’s book back at the hotel – but the library shelf in the lobby is a far better resting place for it than any shelf in her apartment. She flicks through the movies on offer, tries to settle in to any one of the fifteen things she’s been meaning to see, eventually gives up and presses play on _The Princess Bride_ , letting Peter Falk’s voice wash over her as she stares out the window at the thin layers of cloud so far below. 

Mercifully, it takes her no time at all to make it through the passport control area when they finally do land, and within twenty minutes she’s striding through corridors that are somehow both familiar and eerily different. It feels like she was just here. It feels like a lifetime ago. 

She’s not entirely sure what she’d expected to find in the arrivals lounge but she doesn’t think it was Darlene, waiting for her in the front row of the assembled crowd, chewing on the arm of her sunglasses and tapping her foot restlessly. And it definitely wasn’t Darlene flinging herself bodily at her, locking her arms around her neck and almost sending them both toppling over as she kisses her in front of a hundred strangers.

Dom detangles herself from the knot of Darlene’s arms, drawing back to look at her. She should tell her that there are people watching, she thinks, or that they’re blocking the exit. But when she looks into those eyes, shifting green and grey like the waters of the Danube, there’s such _lightness_ in them that all she can do is smile down at her and say the first thing that pops into her head. 

“Wow. I guess you really did miss me.”

Darlene snakes her arms around Dom’s waist and rests her head on her shoulder. “You have no idea.”

“I might.” She squeezes Darlene quickly, then gently leads her away from the groups of family and friends still waiting on their loved ones, towards the exit doors. “You wanna tell me what’s going on? Why your brother’s in the hospital and the front page news is that Washington Township was almost obliterated in a nuclear meltdown?”

“Do I get a choice?”

“No.”

“Fine. But can I just... not, for a bit? Can I just look at you?” She runs a hand through her hair, still messy, but back to being artfully so. “You look – different. Better.”

Dom huffs a laugh. “I had that good night’s sleep people kept talking about. A couple of them, actually.”

“Yeah? How was that?”

She smiles, reaching out to touch two fingers to Darlene’s cheek, the way she’s wanted to for hours now. Darlene stares up at her, lifts her own hand, slowly wraps it over hers. She looks utterly exhausted, and happier than Dom has ever seen her.

“I’ll tell you all about it when you’ve had one of your own.” On impulse she wraps her free arm around Darlene, pulling her in close, and drops a kiss to the top of her head. A word rises up inside her as the faint scent of shampoo fills her nostrils. She smiles to herself, remembering its sounds and the woman who had pronounced it for her, slowly, so Dom could learn its shape. So few syllables for such an immense feeling; nine familiar letters written in an unfamiliar combination. It grows and grows in her mind, and Dom lets it expand, lets it fill her, all those pointy consonants that sound so gentle together. 

It doesn’t need saying, not yet. But when it’s time, it will be there, hers to offer without stumbles and stutters. 

“How about we get out of here?” she asks softly, her hand still trapped beneath Darlene’s, pressed flush against her cheek.

“Fine by me.” 

Darlene turns toward the exit but she doesn’t let go of Dom’s hand; she just twists her own until she can lace their fingers together and pull Dom out through the automatic glass doors into the midday sunshine.

_fin._


End file.
